Technology: Spliced plants open up the field for hybrid crops

A COMPANY in Belgium has used genetic engineering to produce hybrids of crops that cannot be cross-fertilised effectively by traditional methods. By exploiting a fragment of DNA from the tobacco plant to target specific genes in other plants, the company has made strains of many more crops that are suitable for efficient cross-fertilisation. Seed companies who want crops with higher yields often cross-fertilise separate strains of a particular species to produce hybrid offspring which are bigger and healthier.

Plants whose flowers have both stamens and pistils can easily fertilise themselves with their own pollen. The seeds produced are then a mixture of those fertilised by each plant's own pollen and those fertilised by other plants.

Hybrid crops can be extremely profitable for seed companies. But to create large numbers of hybrid seeds efficiently, plants must be fertilised exclusively with pollen from another, unrelated strain.

In corn, this is made possible ...

To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

To continue reading this article, log in or subscribe to New Scientist